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“No One Is Going To Tell Me Who To Love!” Is a Political Act!! by Sherri Rosen

No One Is Going To Tell Me Who To Love!! Is A Political Act!
Being a woman and Jewish I know what the experience is like of being the underdog and being ridiculed.
 
I never met anyone in my family growing up who was a person of color accept in servitude and the folks that worked in my dad’s shoe factories.
 
When I was very ill in 1980 a woman of color, Nancy, came into my home to take care of me and stayed for 10 years. She became my surrogate mum and I her surrogate daughter. She and I gave to one another the love we never received in our own biological family. And we opened each other’s world. Thank God!
 
After I divorced for the second time I realized that there was an awakening within me. “No one is going to tell me who to love!” I realized I tried to follow in the footsteps of my family and lead a very traditional life in every sense of what that word means. It didn’t work! I stopped trying.
 
A curiosity began to arise and a rage began to appear about realizing that I had always been conditioned to be with people that looked like me. Also my curiosity began to take hold. That’s when I began dating men of color. I like many had been so conditioned to have fear of people of color that in the past I never thought about it, but an awakening was happening now. And I realized that i also had more in common with people of color than I realized. Actually not only people of color but people everywhere. I was no longer going to be made separate from them or anyone that was different from me.
 
I began to appreciate my own and their sensuality, love of music, style of dressing, being big and not being ashamed of it, and their out and out directness-good, bad or otherwise, and mine and their wounds. This was also a political act! “No one was going to tell me who to love!” My world is opening up and expanding.
 
I’ve had 3 important relationships with men of color, and to this day I am questioning about the difficulty of just being in a relationship, but curious if it’s more challenging to be in a relationship with a man of color. Mainly, because society has made it so difficult. I don’t care what our society says because the rage is too strong and my love too deep. I’m still processing and realizing I have so much more to learn and the key to all of this is learning more about “racism” in my country.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2017 at 11:53 am and is filed under African American, Clients, Friends and Colleagues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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